Completed Collection Thoughts: MST3K XXIX
Apr. 27th, 2014 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith another official DVD set of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes finished, once more I'm reflecting on the collected experience and how the additional features Shout! Factory adds to the episodes affects it. Joel Hodgson provided introductions to "Untamed Youth" and "Hercules and the Captive Women" (although I always watch those "introductions" after I've watched the episode on DVD), enthusing about how the "juvenile delinquency" and "sword and sorcery" movies were a nice change of pace from "mystery science." He also talks a bit about a new autobiographical one-man show he's performing. "Untamed Youth" also provides an interview with that movie's star Mamie Van Doren. Watching it, I somehow had the impression she'd been reasonably well-regarded by Mystery Science Theater fans themselves (although Beverly Garland might be affecting those impressions), and her efforts to project an independent spirit might have played into that.
When introducing "Hercules and the Captive Women," Joel explained at last that Gypsy's appearance in the theatre was more a matter of trying to distract from the beginning of the movie being a collection of scenes from previous Hercules movies and a lot of narration. The bonus feature for that DVD was an interview with Steve Vance, who's drawn the covers for all of Shout! Factory's DVDs, always working Tom Servo and Crow into the action of the movies themselves; while in the past I've wondered if his Crow doesn't have all the strange subtleties of expression of the actual puppet, it's at least something to be told he watches the movies without benefit of "riffing" to be able to form his own impressions for how things should look. There was also a "cover gallery" in order of how the episodes were released on DVD.
The Universal movies Shout! Factory has been able to release in recent sets seem to have lots of archival material available; once more, we get a little documentary about the (low-budget) making of "The Thing That Couldn't Die," turned out right when Universal was at an ebb but doing well on the bottom half of a double bill. "The Pumaman" (which is, after all, the title in the movie itself) included a brief discussion of "the nanites" of the "Sci-Fi Channel" years and an interview with Walter Alton, Pumaman himself. It turns out he'd been a lawyer before he became an actor and he went back to being a lawyer afterwards, but he does seem reasonably resigned to how the movie turned out (for one thing, the script had been translated from Italian) even as he's sort of polite about not enjoying the stabs at him in the "riffing." That just contrasted to my own continued enjoyment of the episode as featuring a movie that "got to the action" pretty soon on, although I noticed the interview included scenes cut from the episode that might even have established odd moments picked up on. The DVD goes to far as to fit the original movie in, but there I suppose I don't have as much nerve as Steve Vance.
When introducing "Hercules and the Captive Women," Joel explained at last that Gypsy's appearance in the theatre was more a matter of trying to distract from the beginning of the movie being a collection of scenes from previous Hercules movies and a lot of narration. The bonus feature for that DVD was an interview with Steve Vance, who's drawn the covers for all of Shout! Factory's DVDs, always working Tom Servo and Crow into the action of the movies themselves; while in the past I've wondered if his Crow doesn't have all the strange subtleties of expression of the actual puppet, it's at least something to be told he watches the movies without benefit of "riffing" to be able to form his own impressions for how things should look. There was also a "cover gallery" in order of how the episodes were released on DVD.
The Universal movies Shout! Factory has been able to release in recent sets seem to have lots of archival material available; once more, we get a little documentary about the (low-budget) making of "The Thing That Couldn't Die," turned out right when Universal was at an ebb but doing well on the bottom half of a double bill. "The Pumaman" (which is, after all, the title in the movie itself) included a brief discussion of "the nanites" of the "Sci-Fi Channel" years and an interview with Walter Alton, Pumaman himself. It turns out he'd been a lawyer before he became an actor and he went back to being a lawyer afterwards, but he does seem reasonably resigned to how the movie turned out (for one thing, the script had been translated from Italian) even as he's sort of polite about not enjoying the stabs at him in the "riffing." That just contrasted to my own continued enjoyment of the episode as featuring a movie that "got to the action" pretty soon on, although I noticed the interview included scenes cut from the episode that might even have established odd moments picked up on. The DVD goes to far as to fit the original movie in, but there I suppose I don't have as much nerve as Steve Vance.